[Announce] GottenGeography, the automagic geotagger!

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

Hi everybody,

I've been working on a little project for the last few months, and I
think it's finally ready for some scrutiny ;-)

"So what the hell is this thing?" you ask.

Well, at it's core, GottenGeography is a program that takes
geolocation data supplied in GPX format by a GPS device, and records
that information into the EXIF metadata of your photos, so that you
never forget where you took your photos. It is also useful even if you
do not own a GPS device, because it allows you to manually tag
locations onto photos. This is accomplished by navigating the map to
the location you took the photos, selecting the photos, and clicking
"apply". This data is then used, for example by flickr, to show you on
a map where your photos were taken.

"Ok, but there are already lots of applications that do this."

You're right, but none of them: were written in Python, using
dynamically-generated GObject Introspection bindings to access GTK,
Clutter, libChamplain, and GConf.

Currently, the basics are in place. GottenGeography can:

* display maps from OpenStreetMap using libchamplain,
* display previously-tagged photos on that map,
* load GPX files and display the tracks on the same map,
* remember the last-visited location using GConf,
* automatically place photos on the map by comparing timestamp data
between EXIF and GPX
* manually place photos onto the center of the current map view with
the click of a button
* save geotag data using the pyexiv2 module

Some planned features:

* more GPS formats (NMEA? KML? this will depend on what's requested).
* drag & drop (first from photos->map for tagging, then more generally
as a way of loading photos)
* there's some timezone headaches I need to deal with.
* other GNOME technologies that might be of benefit

GottenGeography is developed against a stock Ubuntu Maverick install.
This means I'm using pyexiv2 v0.1.3, which I know has big API
breakages compared to 0.2.2. It also means I'm using libchamplain
v0.4.6, and they're already up to 0.8, but I haven't checked to see if
there's much in the way of API breakage there. What I'm trying to say
is, all you cutting-edge types might have some dependency problems
running GottenGeography. But if you're relatively conservative with a
stock Maverick install, you should be able to get all the dependencies
like this:

$ sudo apt-get install gir1.0-champlain-0.4 gir1.0-clutter-gtk-0.10
gir1.0-gtk-2.0 gir1.0-gtkchamplain-0.4 python-champlain
python-champlain-gtk python-pyexiv2

(ehhhh I think that's them... let me know if there's anything missing here)

GottenGeography needs testers, but _back_up_your_files_ first!
GottenGeography directly modifies EXIF data in-place, so there's
always a small chance of data loss. Please let me know what model of
camera and GPS units you own and how well they worked (or didn't).

http://github.com/robru/GottenGeography

Thanks everyone!

-- 
http://exolucere.ca